Futile Efforts
Page 29
the middle of barren sidewalks
—she's right up the block, my Mama, she ever get up out of the ground,
first thing she gonna see is the whores on 46th, they hang around that area,
give head in the alley. Now me, I might not mind it much, but Ma, she a good
Christian woman, when Jesus come back to take all the souls to paradise,
my Mama, she gonna catch sight of the devil's work
in progress.
We were quiet for a couple of blocks
and he turned to ask, Hey man, where you
going again?
46th, I say, thinking of the bottom of hell,
you can let me off
at the end of the alley.
Sins of the Sons
by Tom Piccirilli
Who is this? he asks.
You called me, man, I tell him. Who do you want?
My mother, he says.
She's not here.
I know that. She's dead, she's been dead
for almost three years.
Mine too, I say, and he's suddenly crying,
and the sound of his weeping makes him sob even worse
because he's ashamed and humiliated by more
than he can handle,
by more than he can ever hope to understand.
I don't ask him why
since I already know. It's not an easy answer–
the shame goes back forever, back to being a brat,
back to being a bitter young man, to all the days
he didn't say thank you, failed to appreciate,
refused to forgive,
hoarded his kind words,
snarled instead of spoke, dismissed
when he could have accepted, lied
when he had a chance for truth, disappointed
instead of fulfilling her meager dreams,
ignored all her frail and weak moments
when he didn't offer enough of his own strength.
He's almost screaming now–howling into the horn
how he wants his Momma, his Ma,
his Mommy.
His number's on the Caller ID. I leave the phone
off the hook and listen to his haunted murmurs
from across the room,
figuring I'll call him back
some night in the second week of May.
On Learning More About the Sicilian
by Tom Piccirilli
First of all, I didn't even know he was Sicilian
until my mother died,
and my brother is talking to the priest, telling him
about our parents, the priest wanting to know,
making an issue here, needing to discover if they were good Catholics,
you understand, the man hoping to ascertain if they were good
people, good enough to be put in his ground,
although the Sicilian had already been in the earth thirty years.
And the priest asks where our father was born,
and my brother says Sicily, like that.
There shouldn't be another complication at your mother's funeral,
you should not have to bear more hardship,
you should not have to lift yourself off the ground
of yet another impractical revelation.
Here I am, 37 years old, and I had no idea. The priest walks in
off the street, and he finds out about my Dad,
about my name,
but me, I'm standing the top of a mountain of graves,
I've been burying my blood since I was seven, but me,
this is the first time I'm hearing about this.
My father was from Sicily.
These are two blows cleverly concealed to appear as one–
it proves how little I know of the man,
and how little I know of me.
A dozen novels, two hundred stories,
a million words unfounded in a moment. I've been
talking about truth, telling you all about truth,
sharing the truth of myself,
and I am as much a stranger to it as any of you.
I took down the man's scrapbook again–
peered at his sixteen-year-old face in the Philippines,
the magnificent youth that I never was,
the hep cat hero attitude in his swabbies,
cigarette tilted from his sweet lips. I've been through
these pages fifty times in my life,
comparing, considering,
contrasting and correlating,
measuring,
pondering,
and still I've missed it.
There's a yellow letter here falling to dust,
the paper so worn that the words can hardly
be made out:
the thing is,
it's written by him,
by the Sicilian to his buddy,
talking about
staying low and kicking the Japs' asses,
sending them running back across the Pacific.
So look, over here
at this: something else I've never realized before–
it's written by him...by the man,
so why's he got it in his own scrapbook?
Fifty times and I've never seen it before,
but there,
in faded ink
are the barely perceptible words he read
at sixteen,
when his letter to his buddy came back:
deceased
return to sender.
I can consider and correlate,
contrast the thickness of the hair on my forearm
to his,
measure the cap size and shoe size,
endlessly ponder the grin,
but when it comes down to it,
I can never,
really, any longer
compare.
This Morning I was Mowed Down By a Runaway Train of Thought
by Tom Piccirilli
-a-
We walked around her backyard discussing school
while her mother and sisters and aunts and grandmother
flowed behind us like a wedding train
of polyester. She tugged me forward and I tugged her back
and our lips met. Grandma yelled in Italian
and came charging. It made me think.
-b-
We were on the floor of her college dorm room,
the music next door so loud that I could barely focus
and find what the hell I was aiming at. She said
my name and it sounded so strange that I thought
she was talking about someone else. Whoever he was,
he made me angry.
-c-
She was cheating on her husband and liked me
because I would listen. She had a laugh designed
to turn everybody's head. She'd use it on me
even under the sheets, like she was trying to call
anyone else nearby into the room with us. Her
husband phoned twice and she used it on him too.
-d-
I'd met her in an ice cream parlor, lost touch
for twenty years and ran into her again at a party.
She called me Neal in the shower, then apologized,
then called me Neal on our second go-around. At
3am she thought I was sleeping and phoned Johnny
and told him how much she hated Neal.
-e-
She was cheating on her husband and liked me
because I would listen. We spent New Year's
watching a Stark Trek marathon while he decided
if he was gay or not. They were in counseling
and he was having fantasies. She said she didn't like
the idea of it. Neither did I.
-f-
I was drunk and so was she, and we grabbed a bottle
and headed back to her place. We started going at it
on her couch, and when I looked up her three kids were
standing in the doorway saying they were hungry. In
about five minutes they were calling me Uncle Tommy and
asking if I was moving in. I left her the bottle.
-g-
We spent all our days and nights together for a month,
laughing and enjoying life again, whispering about marriage,
about how it had been a long fight but worth it all
so we could find each other. Her father hated my guts and
said my hands were soft. He took a poke at me with his
welder's fists. I flattened his ass, and that was the end of that.
-h-
Please, she said, I want to see your poems, so I showed her.
She didn't want to see them, instead she wanted to show me
hers. One was about a bad love affair with a needle freak.
Another where she screwed three Harlem Globetrotters
one night. Another where she wanted to be cut to the bone.
She asked what I thought and I told her we should be friends.
-i-
She was cheating on her husband and liked me
because I would listen. She told me all her dreams and fears
and asked me mine. I had plenty but couldn't quite get them
out. The more I tried the more it hurt. I took a walk in the park
and fed the pigeons. I was starting to think that maybe I should
listen less and start talking more.
Sycophancy (In My Pantsy)
by Tom Piccirilli
I was inside for a time and given my own bed, in a line
of nuthouse munchkins, all of them so damn chatty
and almost as bad with the questions as the doctors,
hip with the flattery, everybody trying to get inside
my head, as if
that's where they wanted to be. Trying to see
through my eyes, to paint the world with my palette,
all of them looking for my notebooks
under the pillow,
in the mattress,
beneath the plants on the windowsill.
Feeding me purple pills, the nurses took down their notes
and I took down mine,
and the paranoia caught fire across the ward, these ladies
wondering what I'd put down,
if I was a liar, if I was sane
enough to notice their cold hands on my wrists, the sweet
depth of their blatant voices
that gave me chills. We circled one another like dogs,
trying to see what could be seen,
trying to beat each other at the same game.
90 days later they cut me loose
and stood trembling
on the stair with a palpable despair, wondering what
I would dare speak of on the page,
of my rage, of how I got so sick
and how I grew well
in their cleanest
cage, what I would bare, what I would tell,
and what I would never speak of again.
Let's put it this way,
I'm over here
and they're all still there
on stage in hell.
Joe Friday, Myrtle, and the Diabolical Case of My Package
by Tom Piccirilli
Grinning that livid grin, she stuck her feet up on the dash and urged
the slick desperation out of me, giving that laugh and hissing,
come on, run.
Her breath as thick and heavy as honey,
mascara bleeding from her eyes like an Egyptian queen ordering
slaves into the desert, under the stones,
to fall on their swords. Her tongue flicked back and forth across her lips,
and a strap fell from her white shoulder. Pale flesh in moonlight,
the promise of a sweaty sack, you do unreasonable acts for very obvious
reasons. I am
the living cliché of my forefathers, the empty summit
of their common hopes,
the wasteland of their menial efforts, they're all spinning
under the earth thinking, Christ,
this is where my blood has gone?
...this is where my sweat and love and death
have brought my name?...
I drop my chin and ease off the brake
because I have nothing better waiting for me now or tomorrow
than this. Sometimes you call the tornado down,
boredom and the sound of your own heart
is almost as bad as your brother's smiling disregard.
You sure, I said, and she answered by leaning over
and gripping my goodies.
I could almost see the cop in the rearview
snicker, knowing that I was no different than the rest,
his twice-busted nose wrinkled, teeth on display,
eager in his judgment,
reaching for the radio to call in
my plate numbers–hey Myrtle, got an antsy one at a red light,
acting suspicious, he's making the air cold, and I think
his girl has got her hand around
his package, yes it's confirmed, she's got him
by the goodies, Myrtle–
I am
a split hydrogen atom,
the destruction of a mother's standards,
the failure of a species
and I've never even done anything wrong. I'm not interesting enough
to have done anything wrong,
so a lot is riding on this.
I floored it through the red light without another car
in sight. At 4am the city gives you
some space to scream,
to chase yourself around the far corners of memory
and brutality.
Ride my bumper, Joe Friday,
let's head to the river.
The siren exploded, the brights boiled my eyes into steam.
She gave a yip and tightened her fist
and I gave a cry that cut back through the centuries,
that made my brother hike up in bed with his nose bleeding,
that shook the books from the walls of the New York library.
Tires smoking, I swung it over to the east side
because if we were gonna kill anybody
I wanted it to be
one of the elite:
the magistrates, the movie stars, the ones who had
forgotten, the ones who did not know, the ones
who've traded my soul for their silver,
out there now walking their dogs
in the pre-dawn glow
of a paradise
they never thought they could lose.
With the Sword of St. Michael Burning Over My Left Shoulder
By Tom Piccirilli
I knew the car wouldn't make it but
the bookstore owner was the king of jaunty talk,
so I got it out to L.A. in 14 hours straight,
pumped. Gave a pretty good reading, sold a lot of books,
(it doesn't mean squat, I never get royalties),
made eyes at the old Italian ladies who didn't know
what the hell to make of the novels
but still liked my name.
They brought homemade lasagna
with them. I got paper plates next door at the Jewish Deli
and we had a picnic in the shop. He'd been smooth
and he'd been right,
it had been a good time.
On the way back, I threw a rod outside of Vegas,
in one of those desolate spots where you know,
shit, this isn't good,
in fact,
this is entirely bad. I may have to drink the windshield
washer fluid,
I'll have to gather up stones and spell out
I'M FUCKED over there in the sand.
Good
thing I'd taken the leftover pasta.
In about twenty minutes I'd given up hope,
thought
this is it, I'm a goner, forgive me my sins. I started
calculating how many Our Fathers and Hail Marys
it might take to save my soul.
I had to get cracking.
I'd finished off my third Hail Mary and was thinking
about how I could siphon gas out of the tank and make
a smoke signal
when an 18-wheeler broke over the rise,
slowed, glided down and pulled it over perfectly
to my toe.
I grabbed my pack and hopped in,
shook his hand and thanked him
for saving me from the vultures,
from the approximate 30 thousand
Our Fathers and Hail Marys I had left to go.
He was a huge brute of a man, with arms that didn't seem
to have elbows, a neck like a tree stump. He wore a bandana
but I could see his head was horribly scarred.
I'd seen it before on the guys
who refused to wear helmets.
We talked current events for a couple of miles
and then settled into silence,
lulled by the scent of cactus flowers.
He cleared his throat and snapped me back, letting out a slow
low dangerous chuckle first. Oh Christ, I thought, here we go:
How do you know? he asked
How do I know what?
How do you know I'm not a...?
Not a what...what?
How do you know I'm not a...killer?
I told him the truth because
every once in a while
it works. I said,
I am pure of heart, man, no weapon can harm me.
If I stuck a .45 in your ribs it'd blow your liver
to the other side of Maine.
The sword of St. Michael burns over my left shoulder,
man, it guards my every move,
I've got paradise on my side.
What's that smell? he asked.
Ozone. God's gonna wreak his wrath on your ass.